"Had you seen anything interesting around campus today?"
The five of us—Hiyori, Ryuen, Ishizaki, Albert, and I—sat around the dining table, chatting as we cooked ingredients in the nine-compartment hot pot.
"Does stealing Class A's Sakayanagi's cane and hitting him with it count?"
I hadn't expected Ryuen to see that. It was a little embarrassing.
"Of course not. You know what I mean."
"There was one interesting thing. Sudo from Class D is a good point of entry. We can use him to force Class D to buy our information."
Sudo? He was a good choice, but we'd need to plan carefully to make sure the conflict didn't get out of hand.
"Has Class D still not chosen to buy information from you?"
I knew I was asking a question I already knew the answer to, but it was still worth needling Ryuen a little to spur him into taking the initiative and doing his job.
"This year's Class D is a real pain to deal with. If we hadn't chosen the point-based strategy, I'm confident I could've gotten quite a few of their students expelled within a month."
Hearing Ryuen's confident tone almost made me laugh. When you did bad things without thinking through the consequences, getting caught once was bad luck. If you kept getting caught, you had to look for the problem in yourself.
"What's that saying? It's easy to destroy, but hard to protect. Otherwise, why would assassins have a much higher success rate than bodyguards?
"Judging from what happened in the gym today, Class D definitely hasn't chosen a capable leader. Or maybe the problems within Class D are so severe that they can't choose one at all.
"Sure, it's easy to destroy a trash class like that. But wouldn't protecting one show off our abilities even more?"
I couldn't exactly say that Class D was beyond saving and we'd given up on them, could I? Dead people were often more useful than the living, but for now, Class D was more useful alive than dead. As long as they were around, we could trick them out of points.
The worse Class D was, the better. The leeks only needed to grow obediently; Class C could worry about when to harvest them.
"That's where you come in. This completely private Activity Room is the perfect place to stage the incident."
Ryuen looked over the room's furnishings, apparently considering how to lure his target into the trap.
"At this school, bullying is the one thing they have zero tolerance for."
Since we needed to carry out this plan against Sudo much earlier than in the original story, we'd have to rethink every aspect of it.
But one thing wouldn't change: the accusation we'd pin on Sudo.
"Sudo from Class D got into an argument with several upperclassmen at the supermarket near the dorms around noon today. The reason for the dispute is unknown.
"But judging by what happened afterward, he's hostile even toward students from his own class when he tries to help them. It only took a little provocation for him to fly into a rage. Luring him in shouldn't be hard.
"Transfer 200,000 private points to me. I'll buy some equipment we need, then keep an eye on him for a couple more days to see if he has any other weaknesses. Once we're ready, I'll have someone lure him here and help him 'bully' them."
Ryuen stuck a finger into his glass of cola and used it like paint to sketch a rough overhead map of the campus on the table. Then he dipped a chopstick in oil and drew a route.
"That sounds like a workable plan. This Activity Room can do more than just serve as the scene of the incident. It can be useful in other ways, too.
"You have to remember that although the Activity Room is private from the school's point of view, the hallway outside it isn't. Once we lure our target in, we'll need to prepare a backup plan to make sure the bullying actually happens.
"We can't rule out the possibility that he'll realize it's a trap after chasing us into the Activity Room. So we need to make sure the bait gets hurt badly enough.
"Our Activity Room is like a black box. The school can only see two moments: before someone enters and after they leave.
"Sudo chasing in after our person, and our person being chased, will be the cause we see before they enter the room. When the door opens again, the effect we show the security cameras must be a student who's been bullied, along with Sudo.
"We can modify the room ahead of time, use the furniture and clutter to hide one of our people, then have the bait stay ahead of Sudo for a while. After Sudo realizes something's wrong and runs off, our person can strike from a blind spot in the room and injure the bait.
"As for hiding someone without being spotted by the hallway cameras, I noticed at lunchtime, when I went to the supermarket to buy groceries, that this whole side is outside their coverage."
As I added to Ryuen's plan, I carried my bowl over to the window and tapped the wall with my hand.
Behind the club building was a greenbelt, and there was nothing along the path beside it. The cameras couldn't see the back of the building, making it a blind spot.
"Tomorrow, I'll figure out a route to the back of the club building that avoids the cameras. The climbing rope and safety gear are the problem. Buying them at the supermarket, or even showing them on camera, would be a huge hassle."
Ryuen carried his bowl over to the window, pushed it open, and leaned out to estimate the building's height.
The Traditional Literature Club was on the third floor, which was pretty high. Students would need professional equipment to climb up.
"That's not a problem. There's brand-new equipment in that pile of junk over there that the Rock Climbing Club hasn't used yet. We won't need to buy anything, and it won't show up on camera."
This Activity Room really had a lot of useful stuff. Thanks to the other clubs for their contributions.
"I'll also have to think about who to use as bait. They need to be fast, at least. It'll be a problem if they get caught before they make it here."
We'd more or less worked out the second half of the plan as Ryuen and I bounced ideas off each other. The only thing left undecided was who to use.
"Whoever you choose as bait, I have to be in the Activity Room when the incident happens.
"First, I'm the president of the Traditional Literature Club. It'd be hard to believe that the bait could just run over here without my permission.
"Second, the rules the school gave us through Sakagami, our homeroom teacher, say they have zero tolerance for bullying. But during my travels around Japan, every school I visited said the same thing. I've yet to see a school that actually follows through.
"To make sure this school enforces its rules, I need to get 'caught up' in this incident, too. I'm an international student, and this school is a Japanese government facility. If something happens to me, it won't be a mere teaching incident—it'll be a diplomatic incident."
I definitely couldn't beat Sudo in a fight. All I had to do was be a "victim" and keep the operation on track.
"So you're not just trying to squeeze points out of Class D. You want to wring something out of the school, too."
Ryuen laughed and patted me on the shoulder. If I hadn't needed both hands to steady my bowl, I would've punched him.
"It's not easy to gather that many points. Besides, having too much money on hand can sometimes be a bad thing. We need to find the right opportunity to force the school to make concessions."
I couldn't be sure the school wouldn't catch on to our point-based strategy and use some malicious rule in a Special Exam to wipe out all the points we'd saved up. So we couldn't afford to let our guard down.
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